


perchance to stay

by gogollescent



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:37:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In their last year as students at Gunnerkrigg Court, Surma and friends make an important discovery about the therapeutic potential of Gillitie Wood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	perchance to stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [descoladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/descoladin/gifts).



> This didn't involve as much Jones as I was aiming for, but I hope it at least gets in an interesting glimpse of her relationship with the parental generation. More complete versions of the stories Jones and Renard tell can be found [here](http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore78.html) and [here](http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/PDF/101/Coyote%20and%20the%20Shadow%20People.pdf). Happy holidays, descoladin, and may you have a great new year!

“I can't _believe_ Jimmy brought Jones with us _camping_ ,” Surma said, when they were out of earshot of the tents. Anja had no illusions about why Surma, of all people, had volunteered them to collect firewood. Nonetheless, she took a moment to scan the ground for likely sticks before replying. It was a task that would have been made easier if she had ever met a campfire: always excepting her best friend and companion, who was starting to radiate nearly-visible sparks.

“—the old battle-axe. Probably thought we 'needed supervision.' When Coyote invited us for the solstice! And to spring her on us, without any kind of warning...”

“It was very thoughtless of James,” Anja said. “But Surma, you shouldn't let her ruin our time together—we will graduate soon, and who knows when we'll be able to do this again?” She did not add that, were it not for Surma, they would never have crossed the bridge at all; not even them, the freaks and wizards. They would certainly not have lugged tents and iceboxes out over the Annan Waters, pausing in the middle of the walkway to sit or wipe the sweat from their heads—the sky blue and hollow as a robin's egg; the river below their dangling feet shining like the flat of a sword. Nor would the forest have welcomed them, as it did, with silence, green clearings, more sunlight than claws: the leaves overhead, sharp as a dog's handsome eyes, dropping shadows like the dog's hot salt teardrops. Dark shapes puddled on the silk of afternoon. Renard was only a fox, Surma said, when she was feeling cruel. Anja wondered that she could believe it. At Court they were already talking about sending survey teams to Gillitie Wood come fall. If the current state of diplomatic relations could be cheaply sustained. It was June, and she and Surma had just turned seventeen: two weeks apart.

“You're right,” said Surma, picking up a dry branch. She gave Anja a winsome smile. “You've really been looking forward to this, haven't ya. You're absolutely right. I shouldn't be such a b—”

“ _Firewood_ , Surma! Focus!”

They turned to see Jimmy making his way towards them through the brush. “Knew I would find you two chatting,” he said, glancing from one to the other. His face was clear beneath the fringe of too-long chestnut hair. He had an armful of wood already gathered, and as he spoke he bent over to scoop up another half-dozen twigs. “You weren't talking about me, were you?”

“Oh, of course!” said Surma, rolling her eyes. “You know, the second you turn away... we just can't help ourselves. Hafta dissect your choice a clothing, your smart remarks...”

“Hey, no need to cut up my trousers. That's what the zipper's for.”

“Get out!” Surma put her hands over Anja's ears. “Anja's saving herself for marriage!”

Anja let herself be tugged sideways, and then, when Jimmy picked her up from behind, kicked and shrieked obligingly. Surma caught her ankles, and together her friends carried her down to the stream, where the others were filtering water for the cookpot.

“We found dinner!” said James.

“A shy beast—comes out for virgins!” Surma cried.

“That's you, Donlan,” James stage-whispered, and tossed Anja lightly in Donald's direction.

Anja forgot herself and flew. She did manage to latch onto her boyfriend's outthrust right arm in passing; the motion took them both skidding into the water, where the lilac forcefield that had sprung up beneath her feet displaced a wave of bracken-studded foam. They landed, dry, on the white stones of the far shore, Donald's arm a steadying weight behind her waist.

Their fellow campers were less fortunate. The wave drenched Surma and Jimmy to the knees, and Tony, hunched in conference with Jones beside the pot, almost disappeared from view behind the splash. “Uh oh,” Anja heard Donny whisper, and indeed when the stream had returned to its bed Tony did not look pleased. He sat frozen, the picture of cold fury; his hair, slopping back into place on his nose, produced an audible squirt.

“Would any of you,” he said, “care to help me _set up this campsite._ Before committing completely to William Golding's vision of man?”

“Don't be like that,” said Jimmy, with a grin. “We haven't even brought out the sausages.”

Jones stood up. It was only then that Anja realized she too had been caught in the spray.

“Excuse me, Anthony,” she said. “James. As the sun will soon set, and our extant stock of kindling has been soaked, I will go out and gather what we need.” She walked up the hillside and into more heavily wooded ground, leaving deep footprints.

“I could set _her_ on fire,” Surma muttered. She flipped her blinker stone up between thumb and forefinger, and caught it one-handed. There was a flash of red, like a wound opening in the air's bare cheek; and Anja, blinded by a magician's knowledge of the card trick in the ether as much as by the violent star of light, thought that it was true. Surma could have made the sun set early, in this hour, clearing, thicket of trees—this globelike orange world, edged by love.

“Only joking,” Surma said, at James' look. She threw the stone a second time, and retrieved it without extending her arm.

Anja thought: he did hear her, then. That was the trouble with forests. Voices aplenty, but no walls. Tony was right, in his awkward way. You couldn't build a civilization like this, without storage room to spare for your envy. Without a tower from which to watch over the earth, raised so high that your watching would not change the thing observed.

 

At dusk, after fires had been lit by both mundane and etheric means, and everyone's fingers were darkly smudged with a mixture of sausage grease and fine dust, Renard emerged from the trees. “Hello, child,” he said to Anja, who was sitting nearest the edge of the camp. “Is Surma—?”

“Over by the grill,” said Anja, smiling. Renard cocked an ear in absent thanks, and trotted toward the object of his interest. Anja watched Surma turn away from James to greet Renard, irritation a ghostly crease between her eyes. Renard, determinedly, pressed his nose to her bright hand, and when he had lowered his head back down to sniff the ground Anja saw that he had given her a nosegay of torn flowers. How he had carried it in his mouth and still spoken, she did not know. Surma frowned at the bouquet, her expression now more puzzled than put-upon, and after a tentative moment tucked one bloom—a yellow half-budded tulip, its stem as fat and strong as boy's finger—behind her ear. The others she slid up her sleeve. James looked on, tolerant, with just a glint of possessive anger beneath his lowered lashes; Renard lay down at both their feet, to all appearances wholly content.

“Anja, would you speak to Surma?” said Jones, behind her.

Anja jumped, and almost fell off her log. Jones—descended—to join her. She was so tall, and the motion so unbending, that was the only way Anja could think of it.

She had seen Jones and Jimmy spar before. Jones had avoided the edge with the same fast, inflexible grace. It was why, when Anja was thirteen and still new to Queslett House, she had thought that Jones was _like them—_ able to bend the world inward with her wishing. Like Anja, in fact, because Surma was part elemental, and Jimmy was just a brave and ordinary boy. Only later had she understood that there was nothing Jones knew how to wish for. Jones could pull a sword to the width of a wire with her closed fist round the blade; Jones could break down the doors of pharaohs' pyramids by knocking. She did all those things with her indifferent body. When Anja looked at her in the ether, she saw nothing but a figure in stone.

And yet there was also the fact of _Jones_ , who addressed everyone, disconcertingly, by their first name, and who did not scruple to use intermediaries. Sometimes Anja thought the ether was a kind of trap for the mind; it became so easy to draw connections between the seen and believed, the felt and fantasized, that one forgot that the ether remained—not as the secret marrow of cracked-open reality, but as an additional limb: a second skin of meaning, which did not supplant the language and import of the most visible world.

“She is too stiff with Renard,” Anja guessed, meeting Jones' still gaze. “And James...”

“ _I_ will speak to James,” said Jones, with what on a human might have been a fleeting grimace. “But Surma must be more careful. She knows what is expected of her. She no longer enjoys my advice, and yet—”

“Is hard for her,” said Anja foolishly. “Pretending to love.”

This gave Jones pause. In the firelight her face was like a desert at dawn, marked out in red and black. “Yes,” she said. “I appeal to you, therefore, as a person uniquely qualified to ease her way.”

Anja didn't ask what that meant. James was loudly rounding up the others for 'campfire songs'; she stood up, hugging her arms to herself against the cold, and crossed to where Donny sat toying with his thick glasses. Missing his gadgets, no doubt. He turned blindly toward her, and she pressed a hesitant kiss to the side of his neck.

“Pfah, singing!” said Renard, from the other side of the flames. “We will tell grim tales of what lies beyond the grave. If someone has no tales, I will speak in their stead.” The prospect seemed to please him; he repeated the offer, tongue lolling pinkly against his fence-white teeth.

“Have you ever wondered,” said Donald quietly in her ear, “ _why_ ghost stories are traditional for camping? I mean, darkness, scary, noises... but it's not like we talk about friends of friends who were eaten by bears. And we're not very likely to meet any spectral hitchhikers here, I shouldn't think...”

“To tell the truth,” said Anja, “I always think it is because people miss their creature comforts. One night out in the woods, and even a haunted mansion seems pretty good. Blood in the shower, okay, but it's better than bathing downstream of where the deer go when they, well—”

But in the event Renard's story was not about an indoor mystery. “Coyote is certainly listening,” he said, with a conspiratorial glance at the stars that were just now sinking into view. “So I will tell you a story of something that happened to him in the colonies—”

“America,” Surma muttered.

“—the American colonies, many years ago. It involves a cousin of mine! A cousin aside from Coyote.

"You see, Coyote had just conquered any number of monsters, and transformed them into stones and rivers and all manner of useful geographical features. He was flush with confidence, and very pleased by his own cleverness in overcoming the horned demons. He loped around the valley he had made, yipping and sniggering in his tiresome way—”

Jones coughed.

“—yes, well, then he heard a baby. Crying! Out there, in that abandoned valley! Our friend Coyote is a compassionate god, and he went to help the child. It was a human baby, so he gave it his finger to suckle. But the baby ate the flesh off his finger, and then his hand; it ate up his arm to consume his body. Coyote died, and only his bones were left behind.”

There was a horrified hush. “And... the baby...?” said Surma.

“Months passed,” Renard continued, “and who should stumble upon the skeleton but a dashing fox? His charm, vitality, and good looks were such that when he stepped over the body, Coyote came to life! Haha!” There was a crackle of possible agreement from the flames; at the very least, something in the dark shared his amusement. “But so, Coyote said to the devastatingly attractive fox—I've slept a long time. And the fox said, no, no, you were dead! A baby killed you.

“Coyote found this very hard to believe, but as a precaution, he put a piece of flint on his finger, and made it his claw. He said: here, baby! Here, human in an early developmental stage! And the monstrous baby showed itself. Extending his finger, Coyote said, you must be hungry—and the baby bit the flint, and cut its mouth, and died!”

Finished, Renard sat back on his haunches, his posture anticipating praise. “Wow,” said James. “I'm glad I already ate.”

“Haha!” said Renard, but he was looking at Surma. “So squeamish, Eglamore—how will you ever serve as the Protector?”

A sharp flush crawled up Jimmy's cheeks, already ruddy from the intermixture of heat and beer. “On our side of the river,” he said coldly, “we're not actually expected to kill infants.”

“No, no, you let them grow!” Renard agreed. “And feed them everything.” Surma snorted. “But if you like,” said Renard, glancing at her, “I will tell another story, which may be more to your tastes. I have been reading about the famous authors they teach you in school—this F. Scott Fitzgerald, now: he seems a little fiendish himself—”

“No more stories, Renard,” said Jones. She had a distant, indulgent tone of voice, which she used mainly with James back at Court: she used it now.

“—Zelda, you know, had such a fear of fire, and burned to death; but beautiful, Surma, you remember, you had all those photos—”

“Enough,” said Surma. “Jones, why don't you tell one? You must know something appropriate. After, what, four billion years?”

“Surma,” said Anja, meaningfully. But Surma was alight, bridling, her hair a cloud of gold.

“I realize you don't have _feelings_ or _imagination_ , but all you hafta do is recite what you heard. You're good at that, I know you are. 'No more stories, Renard'? When you're reporting to the headmaster about everything I do or say!”

“Most of which would not make a very entertaining narrative,” said Jones. She was upright, with her hands formally laced behind her back. It should have been absurd, here in the wilderness where night had properly fallen, the flames embroidering her suit with flaps and helices of gold. But: “I too have a story about Coyote,” she went on, her wide mouth unsmiling. “Please be seated, James.”

Only then did Anja see that James had risen to his feet.

“Coyote has been married many times,” Jones said, looking up, as Renard had, at the winking, taunting constellations. “But the first time—before humans had entered the world—was the only time he mourned his wife after her death. He pined whole forests.” (“I didn't think she could pun,” Donald whispered.) “And he wept enough to widen several seas. Then Death came to him in the form of a ghost, and said, If you do as I say, and never once deviate from my instructions, I can return your wife to you.”

“Eurydice, Jones?” said Surma. This time it was Renard who shushed her. He had been hanging back, but now he twined around Surma's legs like a cat, his eyes brilliant. Surma bent to touch his slim head.

“Coyote promised effusively to obey Death in all things. They went together over the plain, where Death claimed to see a herd of lovely horses, though Coyote saw just the waving grass...”

Anja, listening, let Jones' smooth, low voice roll over her. She stared through the distorted air above the fire at her friends. Not a good evening; but Surma, drunk, furious, and perhaps now for the first time succumbing to shame, nevertheless had a gentle look as she scratched the base of Renard's ears. She did love him, Anja thought. Like a girl loves a dog. It was a pity. It would have been easier, maybe, if Surma had never cared at all.

She moved on. James was bewildered, she knew, always aware of Surma's distaste for his teacher but always, beneath that, certain that she could be won over—moved to see Jones as he saw her—however he saw her; that, Anja didn't pretend to understand. He had his fingers laced in his lap, and was staring fixedly into the cracks of light between them. His face in shadow seemed older, more severe, and etched with disbelief. Anthony, next to him, had pivoted to sit with his face away from the fire; Donny looked at him from time to time with obvious concern. Donny was tired, she knew, barely upright. Of all of them the forest taxed him most.

Anja experienced an unspecific impulse towards protection. She would have liked to draw chalk circles over the roots of the trees; she would have liked to know that she would go to sleep that night with Surma's hand in hers, and Donny's in the other, and magic of her own making to defend her from the stars. It was a pure and rather silly thought, not at all suited to the nature of the expedition—they had brought sleeping bags, tarps, even a kettle, not crystals or rowan wands. But for the moment, what a relief, to imagine she was a word away from saving them. With the embers like red eyes in the logs, and dark boughs shedding needles soft as clipped hair from above.

“...For five nights, Death had said, you must not touch her. As you journey back to the living world.

“It was easy enough, the first three nights. She had been like a shadow, and then like the wind throwing up dust, and then like a poignant memory. But on the fourth night, with just one morning between them and the day when she would be a whole woman again, she was already so close that Coyote thought he could taste the sweetness of her breath. He looked and looked, and grew new eyes to look with; and then—just as they were preparing to rest, and speak no more until the morning dawned—he leapt on her. He could restrain himself no longer. She was too beautiful, too like a person; and in his arms she turned to ash again.”

— _Surma_ , Anja thought, helplessly. Oh, Surma! Her eyes were tearing up from smoke; but she thought she saw her friend pale, and let go of Renard's head.

“Then Death was enraged, and said to Coyote, you have done worse than you know. You were meant to blaze a trail for men, so that death would only be a passing thing, curable by courage and restraint; and because of you, death will be eternal. Nothing retrieved, nothing salvaged: no hope except in following your loved one to the pyre.

"Which Coyote would not do.”

Jones stopped, and bowed to Surma, a strange stark gesture. _She must know,_ Anja decided. Surma's mother—

“If that's all?” said Tony: and threw a bucket of water on the flames. There was a flash of gold where the liquid sheeted down, and a thick cloud of smoke. Then darkness—darkness, flooding them, like a dead god's quick laughter.

 

In the morning Surma was gone.

“ _Renard_ ,” James snarled, white-lipped and hoarse from calling for her in the surrounding woods. “We should have known he was planning something like this! Why else would he have let us tramp in here, playing at _wilderness survival..._ ”

Odd how panic made him more self-aware than calm had. “Please, James,” Anja said, while looking around for Donny or Anthony, who had yet to return from their allotted search areas. Not that he was such good friends with them either—Donny, perhaps, but it was Surma who could talk him into anything. Or out of it.

As though reading her mind, Jones appeared. “Nothing,” she said, at James' look. “But I believe we should follow Anthony. He is observant, and—”

“Observant? That wet coverlet? He's probably gotten distracted analyzing the iron content of the soil!”

“I doubt it,” said Jones, and put a heavy hand on James' shoulder. Her eyes were so dark you could not see the break between iris and pupil; liquid, serious, they reminded Anja of pearls, of simple structures built and balled around a foreign seed. Light itself could be an irritant to heavy shells. “James. Control yourself. We will find her.”

It was so strange, to see him sag, the tension running out of him as though he'd been deactivated. Anja had a momentary vision of the ancient robots they had found, while exploring the vaults beneath the Court—seated in high niches, swords balanced across their knees, the giant headpieces lowered to rust against metal breasts. James leaned his cheek against Jones' hacked-out knuckles, his brow furrowed, his eyes closed. He kissed the back of her wrist. Jones held Anja's gaze, and reached up with convincing tenderness to smooth his hair.

“Let's go,” James said, pushing her hand off his neck, though he didn't let go of it when his head was free.

“James! Anja!” Donny said, running out of the trees. “Tony found fox-fur!”

When they found where the trail began, the rest was easy. Surma and Renard had made no attempt to cover their tracks. A mile or so of dense undergrowth, impaled by the occasional waterfall, and Anja found herself climbing a stony hill that rose almost to the level of the canopy. Vegetation grew sparser as she went up. The others, gifted with more stamina and/or supernatural strength, had gone quickly ahead, but she was panting by the time she reached the crown and saw—

Surma, asleep, at the base of a cherry tree. Renard curled under her head for a pillow.

“Did you speak to her?” asked Jones.

“No,” said Anja, breathlessly. “I never saw the chance, she was so mad.” Not that you would know it to look at Surma now. She had been crying, that much was obvious, but in slumber she wore a smile that made you hope she would not wake. Her makeup was a ruin, but cherries had colored her lips true red, and her fingers glared like a murderer's from between bent stalks of grass. Renard's belly, beneath her hair, gleamed like new-fallen snow. “Oh, Jones,” Anja said, because the boys were running, and Tony had already passed Surma in favor of examining the tree— “oh, haven't we done enough?”

Donny had stopped James with a hand on his elbow, and was speaking, low and urgent, into his friend's flushed ear. He is a good boy, Anja thought; he knows. We should never have come here, we should stayed back at Court; waited for her to return of her own accord...

There was a crack. Anthony had pulled loose a switch of wood from the lowest branch.

“We should bring this back to the Court,” he told them. “I have never seen anything like it.”

But no one was listening. Surma, on the ground, began to stir. Renard was still as an uninhabited city. “Mommy?” Surma said, her eyes tight-shut—Renard's fur framed her jaw in little spikes, like sharp white fangs.

Jones knelt at Surma's side. “Your mother is dead,” she remarked, without touching Surma. “You as yet are not. Surma. Come back home?"

Perhaps Jones was a magician after all, Anja thought. She could manipulate the intangible world. Not directly, but through the use of willing proxies. Who were hollow in her stead—wanted all she could not lack for.

"Just a little longer," said Surma, covering her head with her arm. But after a moment, she sat up and looked around. She wiped the stain of greed from her soft mouth.


End file.
